Oh woe, oh woe, oh woe woe woe, when is baby seagull season ooooooooo-ver
Seagulls are doodah-whatsit protected in this sanity-challenged country. ARRRRRRRGH. Now I grew up with seagulls, my father was in the Navy so we were mostly posted near salt water*. When he retired the family moved to Maine. & to my own surprise I moved back to coastal Maine as an adult. I KNOW FROM SEAGULLS. They’re fine. Well, they always used to be fine. & then I immigrated to the UK & lived in inland Hampshire for nearly thirty years, where a seagull was an event. We had them, occasionally, but they weren’t something you saw out your window every day or . . . ahem. This post is going to get a little rude. I’m just warning you.
The seagulls of northeast Scotland are aggressive vermin & I hate the beggars. The human-hostage situation is particularly stark in this small seaside town, surrounded as it is by long booming empty cliffs in both directions, vast reaches of unpopulated space for blasted seagulls to lead a normal seagully life. But nooooooo. They’d rather move into town, crap all over you, your dog, your house, your campervan and your garden, as well as everyone else and everyone else’s dog, house, vehicle etc, loudly quarrel & squawk ceaselessly all night, & yell at you all day. I object to being yelled at in my own garden, especially when this is followed up by a giant smelly grey-white squelch falling from the sky in your general direction.** They also steal food from small children who even having been warned about seagulls don’t necessarily have the fine motor control or the sheer muscular strength to resist-as well as likely being frightened by something as big as an adult seagull with its wings spread, coming for them, & that clearly built-for-business vicious beak? Yeah. If I were a 6-year-old with a hot dog or an ice cream cone I’d let go too. When there aren’t enough children to victimise-they’re clever enough to snatch something off an adult who isn’t paying attention as well-they eat garbage. Don’t leave interesting-smelling trash bags outside.*** & golly do they crap. A big smear of seagull effluvia is slippery. You hit one plunging downhill after your maniac dog, you’re in trouble. & wouldn’t you think that public health & bird flu & so on might enter this equation?
But the daily year-long ratbaggery of living with resident seagulls PALES TO INSIGNIFICANCE during baby seagull season. Oh glory.†
Because they’re PROTECTED, the only population-suppressing action you’re allowed is to do a nest-sweep. Since they nest on people’s roofs & in people’s chimneys††, the only way to perform this rite††† is with a cherry-picker truck. Hiring one is expensive, & even covering only the downtown-est part of the town‡ it’s a long & labour-intensive process. & the town council in its infinite wisdom decided a few years ago that they couldn’t afford it any more. !!!£$%)@#]!!!£!!! WE WON’T GO THERE. Bird flu! Piffle! Faecal bacteria count! Phooey! But the result is that baby frelling seagulls are now rife, proliferating & doodah doodah thronging.
It varies from year to year, but you know when the serious nesting has begun because from being an ugly messy belligerent unhygienic nuisance the adult seagulls, because this is their town, start attacking you. Yes, I mean attacking. They swoop down, shrieking demonically, & whap you with their wings, stomp you with their feet & peck you with those bills. Oh yes, & crap on you. & your dog, who is, especially if he’s a German Wire Haired Pointer, going not merely nuts but well past nuts, into some other indescribable dimension, the part that is describable being that when this particular GWHP goes nuts, he flails, & when he flails, those long GWHP legs get all tangled up with mine. I’ve learned (bruisingly) some coping mechanisms for this, but I’m telling you that if you have several of these bloody birds attacking you at once-& those spread wings are getting on for a 3 foot span, okay?-you can’t move, because you can’t see, & your dog has turned into a canine Sleipnir‡‡. There are parts of town you flatly have to avoid-quite a lot of this relatively small town, indeed, & two hours a day at GWHP speed covers serious mileage, & doing laps around, say, the (small) industrial estate car park, which is seagull-free, is boring. We’ve literally had to be rescued by kindly, anti-seagull, dog-free passers-by occasionally-one lady went after them with her (furled) umbrella, & said to me after that her terrier (safely at home) also HATES seagulls, but he’s smaller-she can pick him up. Siiiiiiiiigh. During baby seagull season I think wistfully of my joke that when I agreed to take Genghis, I was so dog-starved I’d’ve taken anything, & that I’m grateful he wasn’t small & yappy. Maybe small & yappy isn’t so bad.
So the early warning system for baby seagulls has already told you that the worst is on its way. Then they hatch, & off & on for about a fortnight you see horizons of baby seagull heads where there should be level rooflines, & your heart sinks further & further. This new next-generation vermin get turfed out of the nest really soon, for some inexplicable evolutionary reason. Whereupon they stand around cluelessly in whatever road they’ve fallen onto, this being a town, & stare. Oh yes, & whine. They are master whiners. They will stand there doing their creaking-door imitation for hours. They are also dumb as bricks. What they like best is to stand in the middle of that road they’ve dropped onto. Staring. & whining. I don’t know why the entire species hasn’t died, or rather been squished &/or blotted out. ‡‡‡ They may wander around a little-keeping steadfastly to the middle of their road-but mainly it’s staring & whining. & WHINING. & WHINING. & WHINING. Oh yes, & crapping.
Genghis, as a result, is in a permanent state of Hysterical Prey Drive. Walking him is not exactly a joy at the best of times, since he is utterly focussed on finding things either to eat or to chase, & he’s very good at this, which is not a lot of fun for the schmuck on the other end of the lead.ɸ But during baby seagull season . . . saints & angels, freaking save me.
I’ve told you my house is on a steep hill. You come through the front gate, up a full flight of stairs, & then keep going uphill till you reach the (several more steps to the) front door. But there’s also a tiny level-access pedestrian alley out the back door, that lands you on a little (but also steep) one-block-long side road. There has been a pothole on that side road the five years I’ve lived here, getting a little bigger every year.ɸɸ & every year, during baby seagull season, there is a baby seagull roosting in it. I bet you think I’m joking. I’M NOT.
I think I’ve also told you that I have Genghis in an ordinary harness. I tried one of those halter things, the recommended halter thing, the recommended halter thing that other GWHPs in this area wear, & after a few short introductory walks-during which he made it very clear that the halter thing was not to his liking-he came home from his first full length walk in the thing bleeding. Of course I knew he’d been rubbing his face, but because of the heavy whiskerage, I hadn’t noticed that it was serious. I COMPLETELY freaked out, threw the (literally bloody) halter-thing away, & since then we cope with the harness. When he’s having a tantrum it’s not pretty-but I hadn’t noticed the halter was the slightest bit of use with the Sleipnir problem, & at least with a straightforward harness I can’t accidentally hurt him, although I have shoulders like a stevedore, supposing they have stevedores any more???-it’s probably all clever AI cranes & loaders & things-& I have left more precious Converse All Star sole rubber skidding along the pavement than I want to think about.
There were three of the little muckers living on my main roadɸɸɸ this year, as well as the one around the corner in the pothole. Well, the three-plus-one that weren’t mashed by passing cars right away. I told you, dumb as bricks. I also suspect that some of the local drivers of large metal mayhem-machines may have an attitude toward seagulls similar to mine. It is of course illegal to cause harm to a seagull, poor widdy ickle helpless thing. “Oh, so sorry, Officer of the Law! It wandered straight out in front of me!” & it may very well have. You may not have had to chase it. But I was getting Genghis out the back door & into slightly less seagull-populous territory every day with him hopping along on his back legs while I had both arms around his front end to prevent him lunging. He also, under extreme seagull provocation, starts screaming. A screaming GWHP makes a lot more noise than a whining baby seagull, although that may be because Genghis is usually very close to my ear while this is going on.
It got so bad that I started doing a sweep before I took him out-with a water pistol. The bloody birds only waddle-I mean, I could catch one-so I jog along behind shouting GO AWAY WE DON’T WANT YOU HEREΩ & squirting. The whining gets worse with this treatment. They’re nearly whining in English: Waaaaaah why are you being so MEAN to me. Don’t get me started. The problem is that with three of them, since they are in their own dumb-as-a-brick way, territorial, by the time you’ve water-pistoled the third one off the premises the first one is back. ARRRRRRGH. I always did the side-street-pothole one last, & then raced back indoors, hitched up Genghis, & made a bolt for it.
When we ran into stupid feathered trouble away from home-& during the season mainly what you do is run into stupid feathered trouble, at home, away from home, anywhere that governmental admin isn’t DUMB AS A BRICK about seagulls-it was mostly back to me grabbing him as he lunged, wrapping my arms around his lovely deep chest full of large pumping lungs that help make his screaming so impressive, impressive enough that probably my swearing like an entire Naval Fleet Auxiliary ForceΩΩ of sailors remains unheard, & struggling & hopping & lurching along till we were out of range again. Another coping mechanism for Away from Home is that I get my wretched dog by the short connecting back strap of the harness & march toward the offending feathered object. That’s the direction Genghis wants to be going anyway, & if I’m braced in advance I can keep us going in a (relatively) straight line. I am yelling, of course. GET OUT OF HERE. GET. OUT. OF. HERE. There may be some colourful adjectives to go with this desperate cry. The point is, if you keep steadily after the shuffling chowderheads, large screaming dog optional, they will eventually kind of flap away, whinging like mad. But if I make the mistake of trying to walk past them, Genghis will do the Sleipnir thing again, while turning in frantic circles. I can hang onto him when we’re going forward. When he starts swinging around, my wrist starts making noises like a baby seagull.
One of the things that makes Genghis quite so nutso is that they DON’T fly. If his chosen prey FLIES AWAY, or bolts into the shrubbery, depending on the variety, he calms down, sort of, or at least I can risk letting him have all four feet on the ground again.ΩΩΩ One of the additional hazards of life during baby seagull season is that once Genghis has manicked himself into Hysterical Prey Drive status he stays there. But, as above, the wretched fledglings are thrown out of their nests long before they can fly. So they waddle. & moan. & grizzle. & crap. Oh yes, & their parents may be hanging around, so the Attack Squadron situation continues, although the air cover is surprisingly erratic-it’s much worse during the early egg-&-hatchling phase, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me; they’ve put all this effort into producing baby seagulls, & once they’re on the ground, it’s like right, that’s over, & the adults go back to stealing ice cream cones. Although if Genghis has prey in his sights, he won’t care if it’s several squadrons of velociraptors.※
Eh. This has got a bit epic. I’m interested that it’s all in past tense since I started this saga because baby seagull season isn’t over yet, & indeed two of our worst encounters have happened painfully recently. Maybe I’ll tell you next time. Maybe I’ll win the new ME Paralympics category in dog wrestling, & get distracted. I distract easily. Oh yeah that’s something else I keep meaning to tell you about . . .
* * *
* with the somewhat surprising exception of three years near Lake Ontario in upstate New York
** It could just be the circumstantial chance of their sitting on the rooftree^ of your house. But if you’re asking me, I think they aim.
^ This is another chapter of the story. We will come to it in due course
*** You know this in Maine. Not on account of the seagulls, which are off eating fish the way they’re supposed to, but on account of raccoons and foxes and SKUNKS. You do not mess with skunks. And the occasional bear, but not so much in town, at least not the towns I lived in. It surprises me we don’t seem to have town foxes here. We certainly have foxes-I see them occasionally in the woods^-but they don’t seem to come into town. London has an urban fox problem. We don’t.^^ Go figure.
^ Things I didn’t necessarily want to know. Foxes in Scotland are bigger than foxes in the rest of the UK. You can look it up.
^^ Yet. If they start chatting up the seagulls, we’re in trouble.
† +}[#_{@)*)^%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† As I say, we’ll come to this.
††† Barring a trained orangutan, as per Murders in the Rue Morgue
‡ & which wouldn’t include me
‡‡ You all read Norse mythology, right? Odin’s horse Sleipnir has eight legs. When Genghis is in full flail, I swear he has sixteen, but whatever.
‡‡‡ No, I wouldn’t mourn. Generally speaking I’m pretty eco-minded-I spend HOURS peeling doodah doodah blasted plastic tape off all the cardboard boxes that come through my door so I can piously recycle them, I also wash & reuse the plastic bags that come ditto, I pick up criminally irresponsible people’s dogs’ unpicked up crap, personally I don’t think it gets any more self-martyring for-the-good-of-society-minded holy than this, & I also compost like mad, even if (or perhaps because) my garden is a little . . . ahem . . . ramshackle.
ɸ It’s even less fun when he nails something I don’t get away from him in time, & it gets us up at 3 in the morning when it wants back out.^ With the result that I’m in a fairly constant state of Hysterical Anti Prey Drive, which is bad for the ME.
^ Okay, 7 in the morning. We probably got to bed about 3.
ɸɸ But if we want to talk about where I want my tax money to go, I’d rather it went to hiring a cherry-picker.
ɸɸɸ Yes, I’ll get around to naming everything eventually. But I like to do this in a leisurely, thoughtful manner.^
^ & what would ‘a leisurely, thoughtful manner’ be when it’s at home?
Ω No doubt to the delight of the neighbours
ΩΩ Naval organisation is beyond me. They don’t seem to have nice straightforward categories like regiments & battalions.
ΩΩΩ Another of my many pet [sic] peeves is tame town wildlife. Genghis chomps pigeons now & again because they can’t be bothered getting out of the way. Oh yeah, in a minute, they say, this is a particularly tasty [dead thing, rotting pizza, etc], but they don’t have a minute. Urban rabbits are even worse.
※Yes, he nobbles a couple or so every year. Big ugh. Really, really big ugh. I usually see them before he does, but he’s on a long lead, so he sees around corners before I get there. You don’t want to hear about it. I will say, however, that the worst slayage aftermath was once when he croaked a pigeon. Pigeons aren’t even that big, but he sure punctured something, & there was blood everywhere, including all over him, & me, as I was trying to get the corpse off him again.^ “Yet who would have thought the old [bird] to have had so much blood in him?” We were probably leaving bloody footprints. I was expecting to get stopped on the way home by policepersons in Kevlar vests with their hands on their tasers.
Oh, & yes, I know, JURASSIC PARK got it wrong about velociraptors. But the JURASSIC PARK version has kind of entered the cultural language. & the word is so satisfying.
^ As above. You don’t want to know.
https://robinmckinleysblog.com/oh-woe-oh-woe-oh-woe-woe-woe-when-is-baby-seagull-season-ooooooooo-ver/
https://robinmckinleysblog.com/?p=470